A girl with a rare disorder can now breathe more easily after receiving transfusions of a liquid that her sister’s umbilical cord stem cells were grown in
By Clare Wilson – New Scientist
A girl who was critically ill with heart failure is doing well after receiving an experimental treatment made from umbilical cord stem cells, in the first case of its kind.
The girl, from Germany, has an inherited form of pulmonary arterial hypertension, or high blood pressure in the arteries of the lungs. This causes malformation of the blood vessels in the lungs, leading to progressive and usually fatal heart failure. Now aged 6, doctors had recommended the girl have a lung transplant at 3 years old, a procedure that is usually carried out on children who have less than a year to live.
Instead, she was given the experimental treatment, in which Georg Hansmann at Hannover Medical School in Germany and his colleagues harnessed stem cells from the umbilical cord of the girl’s sister, which her parents gave permission to be frozen.